Ingredients are Everything

I was seriously offended, many years ago, when my late husband, Elliott, who was a doctor (ergo, a scientist), called me an alchemist. I thought he was putting me down, because my vision of an alchemist was one who spun hay into gold. This wasn’t undesirable but not my goal, which was to create foolproof gold standard recipes. One day I thought to ask Elliott what exactly he meant by calling me an alchemist, and it actually was a most profound compliment. Elliott explained that scientists have many theories often proven wrong but, as an alchemist, I test and retest until the recipe is perfected. The uh-oh moment arrived, however, when he went on to say that a true professional doesn’t need to test quite as much as I did and that I wouldn’t have to if I had a full understanding of each ingredient! I immediately ordered the USDA book The Composition of Foods. This decreased the number of tests, but there were still many until I was satisfied that I had reached the best version of the recipe. 

Further research into ingredients, particularly butter and flour, led me to create what I am now known for on Wikipedia and elsewhere: the reverse-creaming method. But I didn’t actually create the method—I created it using butter. And butter gives a far superior flavor than shortening. Conventional wisdom dictated that this method, found in many baking books in the 1950s using shortening, could not be achieved with butter. (Full disclosure: Even as a very young child, whenever I was told not to do something, I wanted to know why not, and often, I would try it! And there was so little I didn’t question, my grandmother told me I had a face like a question mark.) When it came to butter, I discovered that if its temperature was between 65°F (18°C) and 75°F (24°C), it would work perfectly for the reverse-creaming method, which starts by combining all the dry ingredients and mixing them with the butter and about one-fourth of the liquid in the recipe. This coats the flour just enough to prevent it from becoming too strong, which would result in a tough texture in the baked cake. 

The most important ingredient for cake-baking is flour. The difference between bleached and unbleached is significant. Unbleached flour granules are smooth, comparable to ball bearings, so when mixed with the other ingredients, they are not capable of distributing (a.k.a. emulsifying) the other ingredients evenly. Bleaching serves to roughen these flour granules, enabling them to grab onto the other ingredients and disburse them through the batter, which results in cake with a finer and more tender texture. I’ve found that with either the reverse creaming method or the traditional creaming method, using unbleached flour not only creates a less tender, coarser, and darker cake crumb, due to its slightly higher protein, it also causes the center of the cake to collapse toward the end of baking. (If you only have unbleached flour, best to use a tube pan because it has no center to fall!) 

Another important thing to consider about flour is that if you are measuring it by weight, you will get consistent results. If you are measuring by volume using measuring cups, the amount of flour can vary significantly depending on the method you use (e.g., lightly spooned into the cup or dipping the cup in and sweeping off the excess). Too much flour results in a denser, drier baked cake. 

Texture has a profound influence on flavor. Understanding more about flour will give you much greater control and the best texture and flavor in your cakes. Read even more about flours in my blog post “The Power of Flour” at realbakingwithrose.com. 

The post Ingredients are Everything first appeared on Bake from Scratch.